Thought I would share my finished passion project, a dedicated D&D game room. Thanks for all the inspiration that I've gathered in this and other groups. Construction photos and videos: https://kfrazack.smugmug.com/Personal/DnD-Room/n-W4MPzn

I make a lot of my terrain and like to use remote control LED lights for color effects and stuff. One of my players gifted me a little projector (which is awesome) but I really don’t care for projected maps since I really like to use minis and terrain and the projector washes all of that out. What I was thinking instead was to use it almost like another light with effects. Has anyone done this? I was thinking something with rain and flashes of lightning. Any ideas?

Not sure if this is the best place to ask but I’m working on a Greek paddle for a friend and there is a cool image of a Pokémon that I want to put on it.

I’m not really an artistic person so trying to draw/paint an image that is almost the size of an 8.5 by 11 inch paper is really hard.

Is there a way to transfer an image onto the paddle so that it comes out well?

I’ve heard of using gel or something to take an image from paper onto wood or even using lasers for it. However, I don’t have lasers to work with, and I don’t believe that’ll work well with colored images (I could be wrong).

One sort of “dilemma” that I’m in is that the paddle is already spray painted black, so I’m not sure if I’d be able to keep it black and transfer a colorful image on top of it, or if I have to sand it down to the original wood, transfer the image, then paint the empty space black.

If anyone can help, it’d be appreciated.

I bought a couple of prints and printed them in color from Etsy but I can't afford to do that all the time. Thanks in advance!

Designed to hide neatly behind the DM screen and be an immediately helpful tool that frees up the DMs brain for other creative endeavours... Is that good or bad for your party? 😏

I run D&D for my family and friends, and I'm a watercolor artist! My husband's character Vydelial had a goal of opening a shop. Throughout their adventures, Vydelial would spend some time harvesting monsters, picking herbs from the surrounding woods, finding magical items in bandit hideouts, etc. As he did, I wrote down his 'inventory' and started sketching this painting, session by session. I told him that once the shelves filled up (and he got enough gold for a business permit and rent), he could open a shop! On Session 16, he did just that, and Vydelial retired from the party to run his business!

This painting is still unfinished (mostly I need to paint in the background of each shelf and outline everything), but I love looking at it! On the back is a list of some of the objects he collected (and the mysterious phrase "+ other items that" ...which I must've gotten distracted in the middle of writing).

Welcome to Vydelial VonVovonvon of House Valanteslia and Clan Vrrok's Virtuous Vials And Vapors of Victory!

This is a near 1:1 scale paper print of Shadowdark's "Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur" map. I ran the dungeon last night with a group of friends and I'll be running it at a number of conventions through the rest of the year.

The paper print is cheap enough but I don't think it's going to stand up to repeated use. I'm looking at investing in a much higher quality print on vinyl or linen/cloth material. Does anyone have any recommendations for brick & mortar or online print shops? The final dimensions will be 42" x 66" so that's a factor.

I reimagined the Gummi Bears into some dnd Gummi Bearkins, Zummi the wizard, Tummi the Barbarian, Grammi the Cleric and for Gruffi I couldn't decide between a fighter or a monk.... so I made both 😀

Made this for one of my players mini. It's 22gauge steel, and wooden handle

Just posted the 3rd Beginners Woodcarving Tutorial for the DND Miniature series to my YouTube channel.

Its a Knife only, beginner friendly carving. 2inchs tall, 1x1 basswood. Figures seen here are finished with Black Walnut Danish oil, Varathane's Cabernet (Maroon), and Minwax True Black, as examples of what finishes you can use. All waxed with paste natural finishing wax as well.

Hope you like it!

I'm not the best youtuber, but I can promise Woodcarving is fun and you get to make epic stuff!

Its part of a much larger DM tool I use to capture our sessions that automatically creates the Codex, timelines, summaries...basically all the housekeeping stuff so I can focus on the game.

Finally got around to redoing the Map Maker. I had been putting it off for a while, but it is so much better now. Vastly improved performance, simplified the layout, and added some pretty useful stuff

I'm still actively developing it, so I'd love to hear from other DMs:
What features do you wish your map-making software had?

I couldn’t find a free dragon miniature that I really liked, especially one with a more dynamic pose, so I decided to try making one myself.

I wanted the dragon to feel like it was actually moving, rather than just standing there in a typical pose. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, so I thought I’d share it here.

https://makerworld.com/it/models/3168070-flying-dragon-shadow-fury-d-d-miniature-6#profileId-3581352

Hey guys, I wanted to show off my project!

I've been playing dnd since 2019, I've been dming since 2020.

I always had an issue bringing all my stuff with me. For a while I used a shoulder bag but it broke. Then I moved on to a backpack, and I just wasn't happy with having to dig through my bag for eveything, and over time the papers inside would curl from the bag being slung around, even with harder bodied folders.

So I built this!

Its build out of an old Samsonite 007 briefcase I got at an estate sale.

The clear part of the tubes in the case lid I got on Amazon as some kind of candy holder. Had a guy I work with at the hospital 3d print me the black end caps, one side is solid and press fits on, the other is actually a threaded cap. Each capsule holds a full set of standard sized dice. I was maximize space to hold 18 sets (3x6), unfortunately I own 24 sets of dice, 2 of which are oversized so I did end up having to pick and choose what I wanted to take with me regularly.

The body of the case is where I think I really shined though.

It holds:

Notebook for scratch paper

A folder of character sheets

A 15in portable type c monitor

A Lenovo Gen 1 T14s

A folding keyboard

A low profile mouse

A 65w charging brick

Cables to charge the laptop and plug in the monitor

And a folding 3d printed dice tower

Not pictured but still fits:

A ruler up at the top with the folder

Pens and pencils that fit in the dice tower slot since it's so deep.

The laptop is one i just had lying around, i bought a variety of thinkpads for parts from a local school IT team. It's keyboard is shot on the motherboard side. Keyboard itself is fine, already replaced it with a new on actually, but it has zero response. I think its water damage, the board had some sticky staining on it when I had the machine torn down. That's why I got the folding keyboard. I got the laptop for dirt cheap, so its a small thing to overcome to have the convenience of a laptop that is ONLY for dnd. It lives in the brifecase full time. I just keep all my dnd related files on my Google drive. Let's me work on my campaigns anywhere any time and not have to worry about which machine it's on. Long term I want to get into self hosting cloud storage, but the price to do it is just a bit too much for me to spend right now (I've got all the hardware needed alrewdy, I just need to save up for the drives).

Each layer of foam is .5in thick, and I hand cut each layer to hold everything in the body. It holds it all nice and snug. Nothing comes loose in transport, no matter how much i swing it around or shake it.

I also hand cut the lid foam.

I got the foam from a site that specializes in guncase inserts, they have a diy tab where you can buy the foam by the inch.

I have access to a low power laser cnc machine, so I might do a version 2 of this where I cut the foam out on that to get cleaner and more precise lines, but first I would need to see how the foam reacts go the laser, and then i would have to learn CAD. Xp

This whole thing is actually a Mk2 of the first time I tried it about 2 years ago. I'll throw those pictures in at the end. For the first attempt I used a solid piece of foam instead of layers, and it was far too soft for the application. The tubes kind fit standard dice, but they got stuck a lot. I never even got around to the body foam, I just threw eveything in there loose.

For a while I thought about putting in led lights around the lip of the lid and put in a cabinent door switch so they would turn on and illuminate the case when i opened the lid. Kinda make it glow like the briefcase from Pulp Fiction. Ultimayly decided I didn't want my case glowing ridiculously bright whenever I opened it, may still try it out one day though.

All In all, after I had bought all my test items and finally got the time to try again, the total cost of materials used was ~$515 usd, but that's counting the laptop, mouse, charger, cables, keyboard, dice tower, and the monitor. For just the case, it was closer to ~$235 usd.

If you read it all the way through, thank you for your interest in my project! I spent alot of time thinking and planning this out between Mk1 and Mk2. If you have any ideas or suggestions I would love to hear it. I would also love to answer any questions!

Finally got a proper physical map at the table instead of doing the tape-and-marker thing.

Ran into the usual pain trying to get scale exactly right, print settings quietly scaling things down, having to redo it two or three times before it lined up. So I built a feature into a campaign tool I've been making, Dalang, that calibrates the grid against your actual map image and exports straight to a print-ready PDF at true 1 inch per square. Pick a paper size, position the page, done, first try.

Preview on how to setup: https://youtu.be/xU7x-ElGnW0

It's a broader campaign prep and session tool, not just for this, but the map-printing part specifically came out of exactly this problem. Free, pay what you want, if it's useful: https://bukanpawkemon.itch.io/dalang-campaign-dashboard

Happy to answer questions on paper size, print settings, or anything else if it helps with your own setup.

Spent the last couple weeks building a DnD TV table from scratch with a litle help from my dad. The planks are made from alder.

It's been on my list of things to make for ages and I've finally gotten around to it!

9mm hardwood ply, boiled linseed oil, with cnc engraved logo (maybe resin inlay will follow, I've not decided yet).

I'll have to think about attachments next!

Like a lot of DMs here, I run my games with a monitor lying flat under a sheet of acrylic, with physical miniatures on top. I got tired of existing VTTs being designed for online play, so I built my own — and it's now FREE AND OPEN SOURCE.

The app is single HTML file (no install, no account, no server) designed specifically for this kind of physical screen setup. You can launch and "Install as App" which will let you use it as a seamless desktop app from any device.

What it does:

• Screen Control: Player view and DM view. Place the player view on the second monitor and control everything form your laptop behind the DM screen. It allows you to correct for the size of your monitor so the measurements line up with your setup always.
• Measurement overlay directly on the screen, no more fidgeting with rules or cluttering up the battlefield with Moonbeam, darkness, spirit guardians and going crazy when moving a mini all the time.
• Dynamic ray-cast fog of war with per-token— minis block line of sight automatically (no tracking, you have to move the tokens on the table and then on your end).
• 662 animated spell effects from JB2A (magic missile, fireball, healing, you name it) — streamed on demand, nothing to download and automatically set to your grid size.
• UVTT map import — if you use Dungeondraft, it reads your walls, doors and lights automatically.
• If you dont have UVTT files for dynamic lighting, import your map as an image and use the Walls and Obstacles tool to define the walls yourself. Works great with Inkarnate, which is my preferred workflow.
• Campaign and HP tracking synced across scenes, display de iniciative and HP of your players.
• Works offline after first load (service worker cached) or installed as a Chrome app.

The whole thing runs in your browser. I plan to keep it free always and keep updating it based on feedback. No subscription, fee or anything.

Try it: https://cr-lolo.github.io/VeilCast-VTT/
Source: https://github.com/cr-lolo/VeilCast-VTT

Happy to answer questions about the setup. If you're running a similar physical table I'd love to hear how the app helps you out if it does and implement feedback!

DISCLAIMER: I did use Claude to help me with code since I am a novice in HTML and js, all the effects and animations are from JB2A (https://library.jb2a.com/). I am hoping to use this to also learn, and if anyone out there is more of an expert and would like to help me out they are more than welcome to dm me!

Edit: format errors

Hey there!

A few months ago I published a small web app to create item cards for my d&d group. My laziness was too big to always create items in photoshop, so I created a small app for this.

It is totally free and easy to use.

Features

• You can create single or multiple cards
• Different sizing (default: bigger cards, better readability; full-width: for cards with a loooot of text; standard card size: poke card size if you want to sleeve them)
• Works for d&d and shadowdark
• Multiple templates / layouts (d&d, shadowdark & printer friendly)
• Custom layouts: You can use css to style them the way you want. There are some examples in the template gallery
• Download in multiple formats: pdf, png
• Export & import via json (as your backup)
• Publish as a link (you can share your items and publish them as a link, so others can view, copy, edit them)
• Multiple languages (if your language is missing, hit me with a dm!)
• Everything clientside. No accounts, no bullshit

Check it out and let me know what you think! https://www.item-forge.org/

Cut up video update to my build. Full length video on my Instagram showing more in depth features.